#business (468 links)
- The End of the Internet stratechery.com
Excellent mini-essay walking through early blogging on the open internet, social and the algorithm era, subscriptions and small-group Cosyweb.
When it comes to economics, or social interaction, or now software, the only viable approach is to become smaller; smallness at scale, though, means there is not one global market, but infinite local ones. “Local” might mean geographic, or it might mean a private network; what many markets definitely means is many opportunities, because economies of scale matter less than the ability to meet new needs that only arise at the level of the association.
- Some final words on Foursquare teendrama.substack.com
A brutal ending for a business I liked a lot back in the day.
Via Rosieland.
- The bastards coming to ruin your business alexmhsmith.substack.com
What an absolute frontier operator.
- Why do we keep lying about growth? alexmhsmith.substack.com
Great mini-essay on business and market growth.
Humanity spent two centuries fitting those systems with partial controls. In the case of corporations, those controls include independent boards of directors, shareholder votes, courts, disclosure rules and regulators, not to mention public disapproval and consequent activism. Each was a feedback loop, a way to correct the system when its objectives drove it somewhere monstrous. Mr Musk is removing those loops one at a time.
- The Costco theory of the internet joanwestenberg.com
A low tolerance for bullshit has to run as an operating system, built it into how the place works.
[Musk] offers a dream — Mars, fully autonomous vehicles, an addressable market of $28.5 trillion — and positions his companies and their stock as access to that dream, and through the alchemy of capital markets, transforms shared delusion into mass market reality.
- Franchising has quietly made countless Americans rich economist.com
Incentive parallels with consulting.
- The Free Ride Is Over: AI Economics Is Now Your Most Important Strategy Decision | Product Impact productimpactpod.com
The question that matters for the next three years is: what are we willing to pay per unit of value delivered, and what model, architecture, and workflow achieves that at scale?
Nobody's asking the harder question: what would a commercial model look like that rewards measurable plumbing and creative risk? That captures the incremental certainty of optimisation and the asymmetric upside of fame?
- "Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought. coinerella.com
I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.
- The three best bits of data undermanager.ghost.io
One piece of data beats everything else. A quarter of a century ago, my dad taught me the best way to measure the health of our business was to look at the cash figure every day. Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place. The year-on-year comparison shows the strength of your cashflow and whether you are truly making money.
Via russelldavies.
- Every organisation has some madness — Katherine Wastell katherinewastell.com
You can design structures, processes and plans, but nothing will take hold unless human behaviour changes too. Behaviours are the foundational levers of change. But they’re rarely taken seriously because they’re hard to attach to quantifiable goals.
Medium’s recap, financial turnaround, and difficult path back to health.
The Cannae Problem is not exclusive to ancient warfare. It stretches across institutions throughout history and into our modern world. When organizations, systems, movements and humans become victims of their own success, when they mistake "what worked before" for "what will always work," they create the conditions for catastrophic failure.
- Facing an Existential Crisis? — 2Bobs 2bobs.com
- The profitable startup - Linear Blog linear.app
Profitability isn't unambitious; it's controlling your own destiny. It means you don't have to rely on investors for survival. It means you can focus on your unaltered vision and mission. And it means you as a founder decide the pace of growth. And once you experience it, it's hard to imagine doing things any other way.
- Daring Fireball: Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino daringfireball.net
Brutual but justified takedown.
Team Topologies serves as our methodological foundation whenever we need to adapt our organizations, which we implement as soon as our strategy changes. We prefer a flow of small changes rather than a big bang reorganization.
Despite the fact that innovative cultures are desirable, and that most leaders claim to understand what they entail, they are hard to create and sustain. That’s because the easy-to-like behaviors that get so much attention are only one side of the coin. They must be counterbalanced by some tougher and frankly less fun behaviors: an intolerance for incompetence, rigorous discipline, brutal candor, a high level of individual accountability, and strong leadership.
- LinkedIn ads: Everything you need to know in 2024 blog.hootsuite.com
By contrast to hierarchies of authority, networks of competence place subjective concerns like culture, mindsets, values, and narratives as the primary drivers of everything that happens in the organization to ensure the coherence and direction of the organization's activities.
- Runway Financial runway.com
the modern and intuitive way to model, plan, and align your business for everyone on your team.
- How to expand into the USA: guide for UK startups seedlegals.com
- Kebab vs Cake organization - Alex Ewerlöf Notes blog.alexewerlof.com
The 2 most common organization architectures, their key characteristics, pros, and cons with an example
Good, brief JTBD primer.
- Why Costco is so loved economist.com
The company is guided by a simple idea—hook shoppers by offering high-quality products at the lowest prices. It does this by keeping markups low while charging a fixed membership fee and stocking fewer distinct products, all while treating its employees generously.
- Brandification, not blandification - Why brands need to stop falling into copycat functionality creativepool.com
Companies everywhere are investing heavily in paid social, websites and CRM programmes but agencies are increasingly using similar techniques, emulating each other’s functionality and using the same tonality. Done in the name of optimisation and best practice, it might deliver in the short term, but long term, brands are shedding their personality.
- Corporate Memphis - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
an art style named after the Memphis Group that features flat areas of color and geometric elements. Widely associated with Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s, it has been criticized for its use in sanitising corporate communication, as well as being seen as visually offensive, insincere, pandering and over-saturated, though some illustrators have defended the style, pointing at what they claim to be its art-historical legitimacy.
- The Agency Gatekeeper 2bobs.com
Blair recommends five things firms need to be effective at qualifying new business opportunities in order to prevent the over-allocation of resources against early-stage buyers.
- Slapping Down Your Childlike Glee 2bobs.com
Blair offers some ways to help prevent over-excited new business people and principals from giving away the shop and appearing unprofessional.
- A vice president once asked me how I was able to get effective change in large organisations... news.ycombinator.com
when no amount of exhortation on the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that.
- A generation of design leaders grapples with their future fastcompany.com
Rather than deciding how to respond to ultimata and threats, sellers can instead use two key moves to improve their fortunes: Analyze the set-up and shape the process.
Why did the best-selling computer manufacturer, Commodore, go bust?
Nicholas Saunders was a counterculture pioneer with an endless stream of quixotic schemes and a yearning to spread knowledge – but his true legacy is a total remaking of the way Britain eats.
Discomfort is also a prerequisite of doing something new. When you're solving a problem in a different way, it won't be immediately understood by others and you'll get a lot more head shakes than nods of agreement. To get through that, you need to be ok with being uncomfortable. The bigger the change, the longer you'll be uncomfortable.
- The unfortunate math behind consulting companies longform.asmartbear.com
Hiring even one person creates a lot less profit than you’d think, and launching a product rarely works out.
Via Popular.
This sounds obvious, but it's amazing how many things billed as strategy within an organisation don't bear any relation to the business strategy. Sometimes this is impossible to do because there isn't a business strategy, or there isn't one that makes sense in the real world. People just... do stuff.
The culprit is technically rising interest rates, but you could argue it began when founders and investors started to see the downside of swinging for the power law. The first venture funds formed as a way for savvy investors to help innovators create fundamental technologies like transistors, which required huge outlays of time and treasure before they could produce value. But in the past few years, causality inverted: Start-ups and entire markets were manufactured from whole cloth to meet the demand of overcapitalized venture funds searching for a home run.
- Pleo Review 2023 - Business Expert businessexpert.co.uk
Founded in 2015, Pleo is a fintech platform that provides businesses with expense solutions and automated financial management tools. Their goal is to centralise every accounting or expense-related work into a unique, simple platform.
- Optimizing for Taste cra.mr
There are many, many reasons I am opposed, but the one we should care about is how it fosters a culture of decision paralysis. It fosters a culture of decision making without having an opinion, without having to put a stake in the ground. It fosters a culture where making a quick buck trumps a great product experience.
Via Popular.
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- I don’t want to grow my freelance design studio into an agency | Hacker News news.ycombinator.com
We've deliberately chosen not to take on staff. We could have grown at many points along the way but haven't wanted to. Instead we've stayed small, focused and…